As retailers have been working to reduce their transaction costs, self checkout lanes have become increasingly common in grocery and retail stores. U.S. Published Patent Applications 2005/0187826, published Aug. 25, 2005, by Wike et al.; 2005/0006176, published Jan. 13, 2005, by Kurtz et al.; 2004/0220860 published Nov. 4, 2004, by Persky et al.; 2004/0069848 published Apr. 15, 2004, by Persky; 2004/0041021 published Mar. 4, 2004, by Nugent, Jr.; 2003/0115103 published Jun. 19, 2003, by Mason; and U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,856,964, issued Feb. 15, 2005 to Sadler; 6,837,428 issued Jan. 4, 2005 to Lee et al., the details of which are incorporated herein by reference, are proposed as attempts to solve retail related problems. The transition to more self checkout lanes has, however, been largely constrained to stores owned by the larger chains and stores that generate high volume of business. This has occurred for at least two reasons. First, current technology requires a significant capital investment to add the conventional self checkout lanes to a retail store as well as a significant delay in generating a return on the investment. The store must first remove one or more conventional, attended checkout lanes. This demolition must occur even though the front end of the lane where the customer places items to be purchased, the scanner/scale, EFT, and the back end of the lane—the bagging area—are perfectly serviceable. These conventional lanes are then replaced with new self checkout lanes each of which may include a new front end, a new scanner/scale, EFT, and a new bagging area that unnecessarily increase the installation cost to the retailer. The retailer further faces the additional cost of running new electrical and data connections to the new checkout lanes because it is unlikely that the current power and data connections will be properly located for the new lanes.
Second, self checkout lanes often do not make sense for smaller retailers despite their need to reduce their transaction cost to compete with the larger retailers. The reason for this is that generally a greater percentage of a retail floor's space must be dedicated to self checkout lanes to allow the processing of the same number of customers in the same amount of time and space as with conventional, attended checkout lanes. Also, the current configurations of self checkout require service access of 24″ on both the front and rear of the cabinets. This is required because self checkout lanes typically require the customer to unload the items, scan the items, process the payment, and bag the items. On the other hand, up to two people share these tasks in an attended checkout when a second store employee is employed in the bagging area to bag the purchased items. The current state of technology makes it impractical for a store employee to assist with the checkout process in a traditional self checkout lane due to security constraints. In addition, transaction quantity is generally limited due to bagging constraints.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide a mobile or permanent module that could be used to convert an existing, conventional, attended checkout lane to a self checkout lane without major capital costs beyond the cost of the module. It would be further advantageous if the module could be used in a manner to allow store employees to assist customers with the checkout process or improve checkout productivity during peak periods.
An additional issue faced by all retailers is the potential of theft of cash by store employees operating cash registers or customers reaching into the cash drawer. Another form of loss is “Sweet Hearting,” which is where the cashier knowingly passing a product around the scanner. It would be an advantage if a checkout lane could be operated with the assistance of an employee to increase the number of purchases that can be processed in a given period while at the same time eliminating the need for the employee to handle any money. This would eliminate, or at a minimum, greatly reduce the potential for theft by a store employee. The employee would help with scanning the items, but weight verification would still be enabled making “Sweet Hearting” a lot harder. Furthermore when it came time to pay the customer would insert their money into the payment slots, eliminating the possibility for employees to steal money from the cash draw.